BERLIN – There are a great many reasons whirling around within European foreign
ministries to list Hezbollah as a terrorist organization. Compelling arguments
include the Lebanese Shi’ite group’s role in supporting the Syrian regime’s
murder spree against its population to the October car bombing of the
pro-Western intelligence director Maj.-Gen. Wissam al-Hassan in
Beirut.

“Hezbollah is an openly and proudly anti-Semitic
movement. Indeed, the movement goes out of its way to stress that its animosity
toward Jews does not derive from its opposition to Zionism,” Dr. Jonathan
Spyer told The Jerusalem Post on Sunday.

Spyer is a senior research
fellow at the Global Research in International Affairs Center in Herzliya, and
the author of the highly acclaimed book The Transforming Fire: The Rise of the
Israel-Islamist Conflict.

Spyer added that the Hezbollah “movement deputy
leader Naim Qassem said that ‘the history of Jews has proven that, regardless of
the Zionist proposal, they are a people who are evil in their ideas.’ Nasrallah,
meanwhile, has said that ‘God imprinted blasphemy on the Jews’ hearts.’”

The
Jew-hatred of Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah has drawn condemnations from
European capitals over the past week. In a response to a Post query outlining
anti-Jewish quotes from Nasrallah and Hezbollah, including “If we searched the
entire world for a person more cowardly, despicable, weak and feeble in psyche,
mind, ideology and religion, we would not find anyone like the Jew. Notice I do
not say the Israeli,” the Austrian and Norwegian foreign ministries rebuked
Hezbollah.

“If this is what he [Nasrallah] said, it would fall into the
category of anti-Semitic statements that we strongly reject,” Kjetil
Elsebutangen, a spokesman for the Norwegian Foreign Ministry, wrote to the Post
by email on Saturday.

Alexander Schallenberg, a spokesman for the
Austrian Foreign Ministry, told the Post, “From our perspective, anti-Semitic
statements... are totally unacceptable, regardless from what corner or
personality they come from.”

Hezbollah has transformed — as have most
anti-Semitic movements — its anti-Jewish rhetoric into lethal anti-Semitism. In
an email to the Post on Sunday, Dr. Matthew Levitt, a senior fellow and director
of the Stein Program on Counter-Terrorism and Intelligence at the Washington
Institute for Near East Policy, wrote, “Hezbollah’s anti-Semitism goes well
beyond the offensive remark. It includes hijacking a plane in Europe and going
up and down the aisle looking for passports with Jewish sounding names (TWA 847)
and targeting expressing Jewish (not Israeli) targets, including the AMIA Jewish
community center in Buenos Aires in 1994.”

Levitt is a leading
international expert on Hezbollah and his new book, Hezbollah: The Global
Footprint of Lebanon’s Party of God, is slated to be published in
2013.

Spyer, the Israeli expert who has written extensively about
Hezbollah and Lebanon, told the Post that “Hezbollah sees its struggle against
the Jews and Israel as a continuation of Muhammad’s struggle against the Jews of
his day, specifically the Bani Qurayza of the Medina area. As such the
movement’s rallies often invoke the battle of Khaibar, in which Muhammad and his
followers defeated and destroyed this Jewish tribe, executing the surviving men
of the tribe and taking the women and children into slavery.”

The growing
attention to Hezbollah’s anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial was featured in an
expose in late October on the website Now Lebanon titled: “American ‘leftists’
whitewash Nasrallah.”

Now Lebanon posted a video link to a Nasrallah
speech from 2006, in which he begins by lamenting that “Salman Rushdie hasn’t
been murdered yet” and declares, “A few years ago, a great French philosopher,
Roger Garaudy, wrote a scientific book in which he discussed the alleged Jewish
Holocaust in Germany. He proved that this Holocaust is a myth. The great French
philosopher Roger Garaudy was put [on] trial... Why? Because freedom of
expression extends [only] to the Jews.”

European countries, both EU
members states and nonmembers, pride themselves – and boast euphorically at
times – about grasping the historical lessons of the eliminatory anti-Semitism
between 1933 and 1945 and the indifference that led to the destruction of
European Jewry.

Hezbollah’s lethal anti-Semitism is under way in Europe.
The joint Iran- Hezbollah suicide bombing in Burgas, Bulgaria, in July, which
American and Israeli security sources say caused the deaths of five Israelis and
a Bulgarian bus driver, is one telling example. The foiled July terror plot in
Cyprus involving a man of Lebanese descent who holds a Swedish passport could
have resulted in the deaths of Israelis and Cypriots.

All of this helps
to explain that Hezbollah’s lethal Jew-hatred is a radical force that the EU
needs to combat.

The writer is a European affairs correspondent for The
Jerusalem Post and a fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.